Making Progress

I am making regular progress with the didactic novel. I've just passed the 40,000 word mark. As I may have mentioned in a previous post, the word count is a very silly way of measuring progress but it serves its purpose in the context of my initial goal of writing a first draft without worrying too much about the quality of the writing. At this point making regular progress in terms of putting down the entire story on paper is still the best thing to do and having a routine of writing 1,000 to 1,600 words per writing session is good enough to keep things going.

Assuming an 80,000 word manuscript, I'm halfway through the first draft from a word count perspective. If I look at how far the story has gone in terms of the plot progression, I'm closer to three quarters done. I'm sure some people write a 100,000 first draft and then cut down the fluff but I'm likely to do the opposite. My first draft is a skeleton of a story. I would not be surprised at all if my first complete draft turned out to be 60,000 words and my first round of editing involves adding some meat to the skeleton.

Any story has a beginning, a middle and an end. The middle is the most difficult part to write because that's where subplots can take on a life of their own. It's easy to start losing track of where the story is going. It's easy to start getting bored with the story or to wonder if you wouldn't be better off starting front scratch and throwing away what's already on paper.

While the main plot has remained unchanged, I'm finding that a lot of the details are heavily influenced by things I am encountering in my real work. Here's an example: This week at work was dominated by a "conversation theme". People share knowledge through conversations. Shaping the conversation to make it high value from a knowledge sharing perspective is a valuable skill. A high value conversation requires trust. Conversations where the parties involved distrust each other turn into debates where each side wants to win. While I was thinking about different types of conversations going on around me at work -- either as an observer or an active participant -- I decided to pay more attention to them in shaping the dialogues between my fictional characters and in deciding how much of the internal dialogue of the main character to put into the story.